Inspired by a lot of short format content I’ve seen (and by friends who ask me questions that have answers which aren’t quite enough info for a blog post), I thought I’d see if I could do 100 videos in 100 days. I also wanted to see if they’d get more views or have different analytics than our longer format (more typical) videos. I’ll report back after the 100 days but if you want to check out the 30ish videos currently there in the meantime, subscribe to our channel!
I set some rules for myself during my 100 video challenge:
- Videos were as close to a minute long as possible.
- They had to be close captioned.
- They had to be useful as stand alone resources.
I’ve been a member of a BNI like organization for the last almost three years and since I give weekly 60 second presentations there, I found staying short to be relatively easy. It was hard, however, to both tell a story and a how-to in 60 seconds, so some videos were slightly more on one side in the other but ALL had an actionable item, even it was just ‘learn more about X’.
Youtube and Facebook both have built in closed captioning on videos (trust me, it’s much easier to go through and fix than type the whole thing yourself) so adding closed captioning was literally an extra two minutes but I think inherently valuable. I’ve watched videos with the sound off far more often than I’ll admit so I’m sure other people do the same.
You notice annoying speech tics in a whole new way when transcribing yourself.
The first few videos, I found myself saying ‘you know’ a lot. This is an old habit I’ve noticed from being video taped in my college public speaking class and later student teaching but something about writing out every time you say ‘you know’ three times in a 65 second video makes you nip it in the bud.
I videotaped a bunch of videos at once and scheduled them to go live in a playlist… but it looked like a bunch of ‘private’ videos to everyone else.
Whoops, I thought I was so clever. Thanks Jon Hill for noticing and telling me. May we all have a friend like Jon Hill in our lives. Share your videos with that friend so they can point out weird technical stuff like that, because it’s impossible to see some things while you are logged in or otherwise ‘in it’.
I felt slimy about putting it all as a blog post, as Facebook videos, as Youtube videos, etc.
Even though I tell people this is possible (to make something once and use everywhere), thinking about doing this daily makes me feel slimy. Now I understand why people pay for someone else to do this for them (someone like us), rather than do it themselves. I know instinctively that there are different people/audiences on each site but it can be difficult to press that “publish” button multiple times when it’s your own project.
I am glad I decided not to make them fancier.
I could have added an intro/exit to each video but I thought that would be pretty annoying to people wanting to binge watch a bunch at once. It also would have added about five minutes of work to each video. In the case of the short form video, I didn’t deem fanciness (background music, screenshots, etc.) necessary. I thought I might regret this choice part way through the process but I don’t.
I still have about 60 videos to make so leave a comment on this post about topics you want me to cover. I’ll report back at the end of the challenge but I hope you watch, subscribe, and share the most useful ones to you.